Monthly Archives: January 2025

Radio Derb January 03 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m06s Crazy people doing crazy things
  • 06m47s Bracing for disappointment
  • 14m29s Can Britain be saved?
  • 23m00s Consanguinity Central
  • 31m13s 9/11 plotters win again
  • 32m51s Jimmy Carter, R.i.P.
  • 36m21s Generation what?
  • 37m46s Yoon defiant
  • 39m45s Muhammad takes New York
  • 41m22s Number notes
  • 43m05s Signoff with Punta

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

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Odysee is broke again

Transcript

01 — Intro.     Welcome, listeners, to the first Radio Derb of 2025. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 performed by a small wind band arrangement, and this is your primarily genial host John Derbyshire with some commentary on the week’s news.

Dominating the week’s news were the two events early on Wednesday morning, the first in New Orleans around 3:15 a.m., the second in Las Vegas five and a half hours later. The first was plainly an act of terrorism; the second probably so, but we’re not yet certain.

Let’s see what can be said. Continue reading →

The Age of Ignorance

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Note: There is no show today, but for those who need to hear my voice, I was on a couple of popular programs over the holidays. I was on with Paul Ramsey and his lovely new cohost, Alicia Bittle. Rumble link. I was also on with Mike Farris. The Rumble link for that is here.

One of the strange aspects of the so-called information age is how little information there is relative to what was expected at the start of this age. At the dawn of the internet, everyone assumed we were on the cusp of a great democratization of information, where everything was available to the public. Not only would the sum of all human knowledge be made available to everyone, but the ability to conceal information, like government secrets, would be near impossible.

It has not turned out like that at all. In many ways, people are more ignorant now than fifty years ago, despite having access to the great data stream. It turns out that you must want the information in order to have it and most people just want to be told what to think. Faced with the great firehose of information called the internet, most people simply find a narrative source to trust. Instead of gathering up the available facts to understand what is happening, people just trust the news.

This was always true, but prior to the internet there was some competition inside the media for an audience. That meant doing genuine reporting. The local newspaper had lots of information about what was happening. One unexpected result of the internet is a mass convergences of mainstream news sources and a narrowing of what is presented to the readership. Look at a aggregation site like this one and you can see the echo chamber that is mass media quite clearly.

The internet killed off local news and the organs that provided it. The days of making a career as a newspaperman covering local events are gone. Along with it the apprenticeship system has disappeared. People entering media as a career now step into a narrow, vertical world where the major regime outlets are at the top and everything below is aimed at feeding people into those major outlets, while echoing everything that comes from those outlets.

It is why we know so little about the Jefferey Epstein case, relative to what should and could be known about it. The major media outlets have little interest, beyond parroting government statements, so there is nothing for the rest of the system to echo and amplify. For example, the two guards that night have been ignored by the media, despite being the second to last people to see Epstein alive. The NY Times does not care about the case, so no one else cares about it.

This is a pattern with most big stories. The lunatic they caught outside of Trump’s Florida villa should be great tabloid fodder. The guy’s internet profile alone makes for great clickbait, but the major media has no interest in him. In the analog age, camera crews would have tracked down everyone who met him. In this age of a trillion cameras, no cameras show up anywhere interesting. The same is true for the kid who allegedly took shots at Trump in Pennsylvania.

There are many ways to describe the modern mass media, but one label that fits is “deliberately uninterested.” There is a weird lack of curiosity in the modern media that defies easy explanation. Sure, the people running the Post or the Times coordinate with the government, but one would think a small outlet would see this gap as a chance to grow their audiences. Instead, even C-list outlets follow the lead of the Times and Post into the great darkness of modern ignorance.

Look at the New Year’s Day terror attacks. Now that the identity of the two people involved are known, it should spawn a million questions. The obvious place to start is the fact that neither man fits the profile. According to the government, for no reason at all, two military men went crazy on the same day. The Vegas guy’s back story makes no sense whatsoever, but so far no one in the mass media has found anything weird about it, much less questioned the government about it.

Both guys were attached to Fort Bragg, which is a pretty big coincidence all by itself, but this is not the first terrorist attached to that base. This alone should spark some curiosity by the media, but when you look closer you see there is a lot of violent crime attached to this base. It is the sort of thing that in a prior age would be the basis for a big expose in a major news outlet. Reporters would have been tasked with asked the government about it, but today it gets ignored.

Even if the Fort Bragg connection is mere coincidence, we will never learn anything about these two cases. The “journalists” will cut and paste some government press releases into their sites and a week from now it will be forgotten. Like the Trump assassins, the major media outlets will simply ignore these stories and so the rest of the media system will ignore them too. In their place will be the latest conspiracy theories around Trump that the Post and Times are peddling.

The great leaving alone that now defines official media is, in part, due to the professionalization of media. In the analog days, the news was a working-class job, so there was a degree of distrust between the media and the ruling class. Today, every journalism student imagines herself as part of the ruling class and one day she will do her part to further the mission of the ruling class. To reach the top of the media system, one must be an unusually good toady.

There is also the fact that the interests of the ruling elites have consolidated, which has resulted in confluence in the media. In the old days, the guy who owned a major newspaper saw the guy who owned a factory or the guy who owned the bank as a rival, so he was fine with his people poking around in their business. He also looked at the government as a potential problem, so maintaining an adversarial relationship with the political class was in his interests.

Financialization has resulted in a narrow economic elite. They are all in the same boat when it comes to how they view society, so they no longer see each other as rivals, and they all depend on the managerial elite to run things. In the media, the result has been a shift in skill selection. In the old days, getting dirt on a banker and a politician doing deals would make your career. Today, what makes your career is building a relationship with them, so they trust you with information.

The shift to access journalism has come with new selection pressure. In the old days, noticing patterns and having a curious mind were rewarded. Today, those are qualities that get you weeded out early in your career. What matters today is the right LinkedIn profile and the right relationships. It a world where curiosity can get you expelled from your social group, in addition to our profession, it is no wonder that everyone in the media is good at never noticing anything.

This also explains the obsession with narratives. Now that the media is absorbed into the managerial class, it is assumed that controlling the narrative is the key to pushing the programs and initiates of the managerial class. As you see inside every large corporation, everyone feels the need to support the latest things and be seen promoting the latest things, so what little imagination and creativity remains, flows into creating and promoting the narratives that support the latest things.

The result of this is we now live in an age of ignorance. The objective facts are often more readily available than in the prior age, but they are so layered in pejorative narratives that they are difficult to locate. With no institutional support in finding and assembling the facts, we are left with narratives that often serve no other purpose than to make the participants feel like winners. The great leaving alone that defines the public square has created an age of ignorance.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

An Early Warning

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The new year has started with a bang, literally and figuratively, as terrorism was the big story on the first day of the year. A Tesla truck exploded outside the Trump building in Las Vegas, killing one and injuring seven. Then there was the car attack in New Orleans, where according to news reports a car went on a rampage killing fifteen people and injuring dozens of others. Police say the driver of the vehicle was not alone and there is currently a manhunt for the others.

The identity of that driver in New Orleans has been released and to no one’s surprise his ancestors were not on the Mayflower. The media is calling him a “Texas man” but he was born to recent arrivals, most likely from East Africa. He served in the military and had various office jobs until he decided to go on jihad. Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar is a good reminder that absimilation is just as likely as assimilation. It is a thing we increasingly see as alien populations increase in the West.

Assimilation means to become like that which you joined. As John Derbyshire observed almost a decade ago, there is an opposite, absimilation, which means to become less similar to that which you have joined. In the case of second and third generation immigrants, this is a common enough thing that it has become the focus of the overall immigration debate. While most absimilated migrants do not go on murderous rampages, many refuse to assimilate on principle.

This is one of the problems with immigration that the Romans understood, but our current oligarchs do not understand. When the alien population is small, the pressure to assimilate is very high. Those who refuse can find little support within their alien community, so they either assimilate or leave. This was the case with 19th century immigration from Europe. Some claim up to a third of European immigrants remigrated because they could not or would not fit into American society.

When the alien population reaches a large enough size, there forms a critical mass of aliens who refuse to assimilate and find enough support within the alien population to survive apart from the main population. This was the lesson of the 19th century when Italians packed into ghettos became a society within a society. It turned out that even in 19th century America, assimilation is not automatic. The more alien the population, the more difficult it is to assimilate them.

Of course, in this age, there is no effort to assimilate these people. Instead, they are encouraged to let their freak flag fly in the name of diversity. Further, there has been intense pressure on the native population to move aside and not demand these new people quickly assimilate into the native culture. The result is second a third-generation migrants who are alienated by the deracinated state of America and encouraged to hate the white population.

That alienation is not just with the migrants. It appears the Las Vegas Tesla attack was done by a white man named Matthew Livelsberger. Like Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the New Orleans terrorist, Livelsberger was an army veteran and served with Jabber at the same base in Texas. It is looking like these two attacks are connected and the result of a group that may have come together in the military. Long forgotten, Nidal Hasan was in the Army when he went on his rampage.

It should surprise no one that alienated migrants are now finding common cause with alienated natives this way. On the one hand, we have massive importation of people unlikely to assimilate into American society. On the other hand, we have a culture war against the native white population, specifically white men. It is as if the ruling class is trying to create the perfect conditions for terrorism. This is not an unreasonable suspicion, given the performance of the FBI.

Even though these events took place in the new year, they are part of a pattern we saw in 2024 from the FBI and the other security forces. The assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania was due to staggering incompetence. The same is true of the attempt in Florida by a guy who should have been on the FBI radar. Time after time we see that the FBI fails at its basic duties, most likely due to the fact they spend all their time trying to frame people for the latest fads.

As we always see in these terrorism cases, the people involved in this one will have been brought to the attention of law enforcement. The FBI will say they had reports about these people. No one will ask what they did with those reports, because the answer is they did nothing. Their response will be to demand more money so they can frame some people for whatever they will call this stuff. They will pretend they are now on top of this new problem.

Putting aside the FBI malfeasance, this batch of terrorism is a reminder that our rulers have created a tinderbox. The revolt against Musk over the holiday break regarding Indian migrants should be another warning to the oligarchs. To head off much bigger problems down the road, there needs to be an immigration moratorium, including a halt to most “guest worker” programs. Every new arrival is a flammable log on the hot coals of the deracinated American population.

Further, there needs to be a national effort to assimilate the current alien population into the native European culture. Part of this needs to be remigration. Those who refuse to assimilate must leave. Cultural diversity needs to be treated like communism was treated in the 1950’s. It took an economic collapse and world war to assimilate the last great immigration wave. That was with a diverse European population before the major powers had nuclear weapons.

Unless the oligarchs wish to be swinging from trees, they need to head off this looming demographic disaster. Things like diversity and openness are luxury goods that can be indulged in easy times, but the easy times are over, so these leisure habits must be replaced with realism. What the first day of the new year tells us is America has a real problem with its population. That reality can no longer be ignored. To fix it means being realistic about the human condition.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

2025 Predictions

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One of the challenges with making predictions the last few years was that every year seemed to be wilder than the last. It was tempting to hope that crazy things you want to see happen would happen. This year, it feels like we are headed to a more normal time, but that probably means we see some important things begin to happen, now that the crazies are going into hibernation. This could turn out to be a less dramatic year than 2024, but a much more substantial one.

Every year there is an important topic that is bubbling under the surface, either in the ruling class or amongst the rabble, that suddenly breaks through. In 2024, we moved from “securing the border” to “mass deportation now” as the growing sentiment against immigration of all types finally broke through. The 2025 issue will be the collapsing birth rates around the world. It is a thing that gets discussed in certain circles, but 2025 will be the year it goes mainstream.

We will have to suffer from the usual slop from the commentariat, who will try to make money applying the old slogans to this issue. The public nuisances we call influencers will pollute the waters too. But by the end of the year, the educated debate will settle on the four D’s of human destiny. Diet, Development, Divinity and Deracination will be the focus for what is causing the fertility collapse. The most important issue in the world will suddenly become import…

A long ignored issue related to the immigration debate and related to the birth rate debate, is the collapse of middle-class wages relative to the labor productivity gains of the last thirty years. A thing everyone has sensed for a long time is finally getting hard numbers attached to it. The truth is the fruit of the microprocessor revolution went primarily to the economic elites. Meanwhile, the middle-class has seen themselves turned into wage slaves…

One immediate upshot in the changing nature of the online right will be the long overdue marginalization of the influencer. These pests who jump into every issue hoping to score attention, while pretending to lead the debate will finally run out of road with the audience. They will not go away completely as there is always a supply of suckers for them to grift, but in 2025 the label “influencer” will become synonymous with the word “grifter” for the online right…

Once Trump ascends the throne, he will pardon all but a handful of the January 6 victims, leaving the edge cases for review. The overwhelming majority of the victims should have been handed a fine, but some did engage in criminal acts that are serious enough to warrant a review before pardoning. These victims may get commutations as a compromise solution. There will be no retribution from Team Trump. He will avoid going down this road for political reasons…

In February, the Republican Party will try to focus Trump on passing another tax scheme like they did in his first term. This will be part of a scheme to run the clock until the midterms, which they plan to throw to the Democrats. Having learned his lesson, Trump will squash this idea before it gets going. Look for Trump to be much tougher with his own party this time around. The fact is the biggest obstacle to reform is the GOP and the conservative industrial complex…

In the run up to the German elections, the government will begin arresting AfD members on the grounds they are coordinating with Russia. The Musk endorsement will prove to be the thing that breaks the glass for many Germans, and we will see polling that suggests the AfD could be following the path of Le Pen as a populist alternative to the corrupt ruling coalition. In defense of democracy, the German ruling coalition will seek to take the public out of the process…

The unrest in Syria will begin to spill over into other countries. Jordan will be the first crisis as the government has been unpopular for a long time but has also been weakening for a long time. They have the same problem as the Assad government, just without American sanctions. Similarly, the Egyptian government will begin to crack in the face of new activity by the Muslim Brotherhood and the spill over from the Israeli war on the people of Gaza.

This will not be the only problem in the Muslim world. The Israelis will shift from Iran as the great enemy to Turkey, as the Turks seek to establish themselves as the new Ottoman empire and regional hegemon. The Turks are using the Syrian crisis to address their Kurdish problem and build a new Arab coalition that is aligned with them over the Iranians. The Israelis will seek to use rising tensions between the Turks and Washington to warrant a militaristic line against Ankara…

Despite his promise to end the war in Ukraine within 24-hours, Trump will find that there is no deal to be made in Ukraine. Zelensky and his European backers will never agree to a deal and the Russians are in no mood to help Trump, so the result will be a slow burn of Ukraine until it collapses this summer. Trump will conclude that it is a loser and simply stop supporting Zelensky. Often, the best solution to a problem is to accept that there is no solution to the problem…

Trump will begin talks with China that will evolve into a grand bargain to not just include Taiwan, but the long-term economic relationship between the Western hemisphere and the Chinese. Trump’s bluster about the Panama Canal is aimed at expanding the discussion beyond Taiwan. Adding China’s growing influence in South America gives Trump options, but also gives the Chinese a shot at a long-term solution to their problems as well…

I will have three surprises for 2025…

In sports, the world will suddenly realize that soccer is boring and stop watching these interminable events. The New York Mets will win the World Series, and the Detroit Lions will win the Super Bowl. This will lead many to dub 2025 the year of the loser in honor of the fanbases of these two teams. In 2025 it will finally be acknowledged that we have moved past peak sports. Interest has been declining, but new ways to monetize every nook and cranny has masked it, but the mask drops in 2025…

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!